The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism

Abstract

In of most recent of his many jeremiads, French theologian Jacques Ellul unleashes his considerable wrath on what he claims is perhaps major failing of our time: humiliation of word (1985). The culprit, as might be expected, is privileging of vision, which Ellul traces as far back as fourteenth-century Church's desperate resort to idolatry to maintain faithful in a period of extreme crisis. Through subsequent advances in technological means for reproducing and disseminating images-Ellul's animus against technology is well-known-the over-turning of traditional primacy of word has been solidified to point of virtual irreversibility. The result, he concludes, is that we now live in an era of debauchery of (Ibid.: 119) in which a virulent hostility toward word prevents us from accepting truth of divine annunciation. Ellul's contrast between idolatrous images and God's word is, of course, a time-honored in history of Western religion. Ellul himself traces it to such texts as First Epistle of John with its condemnation of lust of eyes (Ibid.: 81). And he explicitly affirms what he calls the contradiction between word and image in Bible, contrary to present-day tendency to meld them into one (Ibid.: 48). Whereas some commentators contrast Jewish taboo on graven images or seeing face of God with Christian toleration for word made flesh in incarnation, a toleration that